My thanks for your patient and courteous conversation on the phone. I enclose
my open letter, which summarizes my view on many of these issues, and my letter
to Ms Tisdale, which goes into some detail on the financial calculations. I
also enclose my posting reporting (among other things) on our conversation,
both so that you can correct me if I misstated your position, and so that you
can see the proposition for which Their Majesties of the Middle cite you as the
authority. Incidentally, someone posted this morning that he had checked the
(hand) folding cost at a local shop, and it was $20/1000. For 23,000 copies,
that comes to $460. Postage for the extra ounce comes to about $5300.

A few further points with regard to the 1992 request for comment on required
membership.

1. You note that only two percent of the membership responded. If the Board's
attitude is "only 300 people wrote in, 84% were against, but that tells us
nothing" why in the world should anyone bother to write in? One more letter
moves it from 300 to 301, which will still be ignored.

2. It was the Board that set up that particular way of soliciting the
membership's opinion. When you liked the result--as when a majority approved of
membership for fighters--you cited it as support for your actions. You now seem
to be saying that, having set up a mechanism for learning what the membership
thinks, you will ignore it whenever you don't like the result.

3. Not only did the Board ask to get a response in this form, it has announced
in the past that it will refuse other forms of response--specifically that it
will not accept petitions or (I think) form letters or letters with multiple
signatures. This puts you in the somewhat odd position of saying that you will
only accept responses from those who care enough to write individual
letters--and then saying that such responses tell you nothing. You are also in
the position of being unwilling to listen to anyone who does not care enough to
write an individual letter, but then answering those individual letters with
form letters. At least, three people so far have, to my knowledge, gotten
identical letters from Ms Tisdale--although none of the letters identified
itself as a form letter.

4. In fact, the 1992 response is quite informative. The fact that it is not a
random sample makes it hazardous to deduce, say, that opposition is between 80%
and 88%. But it would take a very biased sample to get 84% opposition from a
population that was really in favor of the measure. Do you have any reason to
believe that such bias exists--that people who care enough to write letters are
much more likely to be on one side than the other? In my experience, both sides
feel strongly. If you have no such reason, then 84% against is the best
available estimate of membership feeling, and the claim that the membership is
for the proposal, although logically possible, is very unlikely.

As I remember, the comments accompanying the poll were substantially biased in
favor of the proposal. Indeed, I think I remember an apologetic comment on this
from whoever was running it at the time the results were published. So that
suggests that the best guess is probably more than 84% opposition.